1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates the VoiceXML software language and, more particularly, a VoiceXML language extension for natively supporting voice enrolled grammars.
2. Description of the Related Art
Voice enrolled grammars are an industry standard speech recognition feature that permits users to enroll phrases into a recognition grammar using their voice. For example, a list of contacts can be created and maintained by recording spoken contact names. The spoken names are added to a speaker dependent recognition grammar, which can thereafter recognize future utterances of the names. This technique is sometimes referred to as speaker-dependent recognition. Use of voice enrolled grammars permits users to vocally customize personal services, such as Voice Activated Dialing services.
Voice enrollment often utilizes enrollment sessions to add, remove, or update acoustically provided phrases to an associated speech grammar, called a personal grammar. In an enrollment session, new acoustically provided phrases can be added to a personal grammar by initially providing a phrase, which may need to be repeated numerous times to ensure consistency is achieved for the phrase. If the new phrase does not clash with existing phrases in the personal grammar, a new phrase entry can be generated. The phrase entry can thereafter be speech recognized.
A voice enrolled grammar, unlike a text-based grammar, can be used in situations where a textual representation of a phrase is unavailable. This is often the case when a phrase represents a proper noun, such as a name. The following dialog example illustrates such a situation.
UserAdd a person to my address bookSystemPlease say the name you would like to add or say cancel.UserBob SmithSystemWhat is the phone number for [Bob Smith]?UserFive five five one two one two*return to top level menu*UserCall Bob SmithSystemCalling [Bob Smith]*System dials 555-1212*
In the above example, voice enrollment can be used to add an acoustically provided phrase of [Bob Smith] to a personal grammar. It should be noted that the acoustically provided phrase is used not only to enroll [Bob Smith] but is recorded and presented back to the user in other interactions.
Conventional techniques for implementing voice enrolled grammars and related technologies in VoiceXML have significant shortcomings. These shortcoming result from a lack of native support for voice enrolled grammars in the VoiceXML language model. Existing solutions implementing voice enrolled grammars with VoiceXML based products use the Web programming model and/or a VoiceXML object tag to access voice enrollment features, neither of which provide native language access. This results in many programming inefficiencies and a lack of uniform handling of speech recognition tasks when using both text enrolled grammars and voice enrolled grammars.